“In the name of all the Catalan independence and democracy, Anonymous Catalonia asks all the Anons of the world who are in favour of the freedom of expression [...] and peaceful dialogue to persist in the #FreeCatalonia operation until 29 October 2017.”

Various accounts associated with the disparate group have been tweeting messages with #opCatalunya and #FreeCatalonia, claiming “big attacks are coming”, although the government sites in question appear to be back to normal now.

“We wish to state that the Catalan people's desire to express their will via a referendum is the majority view and cuts across all strata of society and is in keeping with the civic, peaceful and democratic determination expressed in the multitudinous demonstrations held by organised society in favour of its right to decide,” noted another Anonymous branded video.

Stephanie Weagle, VP at Corero Network Security, argued that DDoS attacks continue to function as an effective disrupter of businesses and in some cases help to distract IT teams while information is stolen.

“In order to effectively protect their networks, prevent disruptions to customer operations, and better protect against service outages, downtime and potential data theft, companies need real-time visibility and mitigation of all DDoS attack traffic targeting their networks, regardless of size or duration,” she added.

“Traditional security infrastructure will not stand up to these service interrupting attacks—a dedicated layer of DDoS mitigation is required to eliminate the DDoS threat.